Thanks, Obama ... for something or other

Tuesday

Jan 24, 2017 at 12:22 PM

Paul Westermeyer

With his last major act as president, before handing the keys to the White House to America’s greasiest slumlord, Barack Obama did something as emblematic as it must have been cathartic. In commuting the draconian sentence of Chelsea Manning, a withering ghost whose attempt at probity was swiftly rewarded with brutal shackles, Casper the Erstwhile President must have felt he freed a similarly tortured soul.

It is, of course, ludicrous to compare a frustrating eight years with the sadistic abuse of a soldier, punished for whistleblowing on horrifying diplomatic cables that make the Zimmerman Telegram look like James Joyce’s tawdry letters to his wife. Then again, no one said psychoanalytical transference need make a lick of sense to outside observers.

Obama’s presidential legacy is one of haunting — he’ll haunt conservatives and their obsessive demurring of liberalism; he’ll haunt progressives with his failing to disentangle money from politics; he’ll haunt libertarians by not entangling money and politics enough. Nevertheless, with his popularity still somehow above water, he’ll most definitely haunt Donald Trump, whose own likability ranks somewhere between a “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” villain and cancer.

As is the nature of the world we live in, memes have streamlined the accomplishments (and “accomplishments”) of the administration of the 44th POTUS, abridged into ironic “thanks, Obamas’” and post-ironic “thanks, Obamas’” — “He brought us back from recession!” “He expanded the debt!” “He instituted major healthcare reform!” “He gave Iran nukes!” “Climate change!” “Foreign war!” “Gay marriage!” “ ... Gay marriage!” “Drones!”

In a country as divided as ours, it’s little wonder that many will rank Obama as one of our finest presidents ... and just as many will rank him as one of our worst: trying to place either laurel wreaths or handcuffs on a phantasm will end in disappointment for everyone.

What are we left with, then, in assessing what our first black president gave us? History will show that Obama’s true bequest to America and to the Democratic Party was his unassailable charisma — which should be as much a point of pride as it is a cautionary tale.

As an orator and inspirational figure in modern American politics, Obama is just about unrivaled; combining a preternatural charm, appeals to some higher, if fugitive, moral plane and a caustic wit when dealing with his often intellectually deficient partisan foes, our previous president is talented in a way that our incumbent never will be: Trump, too, is fluent in nebulous gestations, but his has a definite knack for division as opposed to unity.

The reality, however, is that Obama was a boilerplate liberal politician, a plug and play computer bus wired by policy wonks with one hand on the presidential tiller, the other registering the pulse from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, while ignoring the plaque that began clogging arteries in the heartland.

We see this no more clearly than in the failed campaign of Hillary Clinton, a droid from the galaxy’s most boring planet. Clinton ran on a disastrous platform of Obama fealty, liberal status quo and winks to whatever remains of moderate conservatism, and was only spared a truly devastating defeat due to her running against an authoritarian and somehow sober version of Dudley Moore’s “Arthur.” If that’s not embarrassing enough for Clinton to leave politics forever, I don’t know what is.

And, for allowing even his moderate successes to be smashed like a Jenga tower by a colicky man-baby suffering from carotenoderma, Obama himself deserves some of the blame. The busted orange clock was right twice, correctly lambasting trade deals which have punished American workers, and rightly accusing Democrats of having done little to assuage mounting fears of the viability of industry in the future.

The losing party banked on unions and union members to create “firewalls” where Trump’s creeping fascism would not be soluble. Instead, stalwart blue states like Michigan and Wisconsin became a fire sale, bidding out votes to the candidate who seemed, at least, to have their concerns in mind.

Obama, who enjoyed quoting MLK regarding the moral arc of history bending toward justice, won his first election handily and his second, rather comfortably. Other legislative Democrats, meanwhile, were slaughtered in the midterm interims. While social justice rings as true to liberal voters as it does to the progressive Left, the growing wealth gap catastrophe was given the effortless Obama shrug.

Truthfully? He could afford to ignore such things, be forced to hop on one foot while blindfolded and still outpace every horse in the race. But Democrats banking on rhetoricians as gifted as Obama cropping up to pursue moderate, Third Way reform ought to get used to losing — he was once-in-a-generation talent in peddling middling goods.

I guess I owe a “thanks, Obama.” I’m sure the “for what” will come to me at some point.

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